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I have the latest ACC with radar in my car, camera, lane departure warning, and what have you. Still, I need to watch out all the time, analyze the situation, engage, disengage, set a new setpoint, and so on. If I don’t do that, it can still become dangerous or at least uncomfortable, because the still relatively dumb system does not understand all it “sees”.

Highly integrated semiconductor products are not only a trend in consumer products, but also in motor-control applications. Concurrently, the share of Brushless DC (BLDC) motors is gradually increasing over other motor types in a number of markets, such as automotive and medical applications.

Leveraging advanced processor functionality to facilitate ease of design has been discussed throughout recent decades. Nowadays, even greater design flexibility allows engineers to use standard Model-Based design with MATLAB and Simulink can be used to optimize motor control systems functionality and to minimize overall design time.

When the vision of a smart grid first appeared over a decade ago, it was revolutionary and broadly recognized as being so. Yet even an informal assessment of the facility and technology development necessary to realize that vision made it clear that smart grids would require a lengthy evolution.

As applications become more complex, home-run sensor wiring approaches become more difficult and costly to implement. The cost of running sensor cable can often be the single largest line item for installing new data acquisition systems once labor and capital costs are included.

Failures have increasingly serious consequences as today’s electronics systems become smaller, more complex and more deeply embedded in our daily lives. System failures must be found and fixed before they can cause costly downtime, product recalls and reputational damage.

Consumer expectations continue to create a relentless challenge for the electronics industry, demanding that each new generation of mobile devices delivers increased performance — more applications, faster speed, and longer battery life — all without sacrificing reliability.

Capacitive screens have become fairly ubiquitous in the world of electronics. You can find them in tablets, cell phones, medical devices, and pretty much anywhere else you look. But using capacitive displays in designs can still be challenging. We want to know what you (or your company or your fellow engineer) struggle with when it comes to designing with touchscreens.

Today’s electronic products must work under all types of conditions, not just ideal ones. That being the case, AC sources used in test applications must not only supply a stable source of AC, they must also simulate power-line disturbances and other non-ideal situations.

Portable devices such as cell phones, MP3 players and tablets have become popular over the years. Most people own at least two of these devices. Each device requires a power adapter to charge and provide power for these portable electronics.

All electrical systems, including computers, entertainment systems, mobile phones, medical instrumentation and automotive electronics, need to be immune from damage due to electrical transients encountered on a day-to-day basis. Electrical transients can come from many sources.

Machine assembly technology for all size orders (especially small sizes) and related advances in stencil printing capability significantly impacted board level assembly in 2013. The auto assembly field has benefited tremendously from this progress. A major driver for these auto assembly changes came from advances in board packaging from active components like semiconductors....

Detecting counterfeit electronic components is not easy — if it was, our industry would not be suffering the $160 billion in annual risk identified by IHS Research. The industry is being forced to take action, with recent federal legislation setting an example for the entire supply chain....

Manufactured for more than twenty years, ceramic capacitors utilizing base metal electrode (BME) technology are routinely designed into applications spanning several industries. Widely employed throughout the automotive industry, BME capacitors have long been qualified to the AEC-Q200 specification....

Modern CPV equipment consists of a metal pedestal cemented into the ground onto which a large metal frame is mounted on pivoting supports thus enabling it to move on an x-y axis with the help of a gear-drive assembly. Many CPV modules, mounted on the frame, contain a dozen or more highly efficient multi-junction interconnected CPV cells....